Are You Cutting Back on Sleep Too Much?

By: Royane Real

Do you get enough sleep? Chances are you don't. Many people
living in modern industrial societies suffer from a chronic, and
worsening sleep deficit.

Until a few decades ago, most people lived lives so very
different from ours that we would scarcely recognize them. Until
fairly recently in human history the majority of people lived in
small villages or on farms, not in big cities. There were no
electric lights.

There weren't any faxes or e-mails. There was no Internet, and
no television. Once the sun went down, most of the day's
activities came to an end.

People worked very hard physically, and only a very small
minority had what we would call "white collar" jobs. And most
people, on average, slept nine to nine and a half hours each
night.

For most of us today, an average of nine hours sleep each night
is an impossible dream. In our very busy schedules, something
has to give, and quite often the choice many of us are making is
to cut back on our hours of sleep.

If you listen to, or read some of the popular current guides to
success, you will usually be instructed to work hard, play hard,
study hard, be more outgoing, and gain every advantage you can.
The struggle to the top can be ruthless. Why, even the struggle
to stay where you are and not to lose your place can be ruthless.

Where do many of these success guides and gurus tell you to cut
back? Why, on your hours of sleep. They'll tell you that
sleeping more than five or six hours a night is a waste of time.
They'll tell you that the world is moving ahead while you are
dozing, and that you'll never catch up if you indulge your
desire to sleep. If you snooze, you lose!

They'll tell you that you don't really need those extra two or
three hours of sleep each night. That it's just a bad habit
you've developed. That it's self-indulgent. That a full night's
sleep is the booby prize for losers in the game of life.

Unfortunately, this advice goes against thousand of years of
human biology.

It's true that some of us really do need only five or six hours
of sleep each night, but those people are in a minority. Most of
us require seven, eight, or even more hours of good quality
sleep every night in order to function at our best
intellectually, physically and emotionally.

In sleep deprivation experiments conducted on volunteers, it has
been found that even a few days of sleep loss produce a marked
negative effect on a person's mental abilities. It becomes much
harder to focus mentally and to process information.

Decisions take longer to make, and are of poorer quality.
Learning and remembering new information becomes more difficult,
and it becomes harder to recall information that was previously
learned. Creativity declines, while mistakes increase.

A person who hasn't had enough restorative sleep will have
difficulty handling technical machinery. In addition, lack of
sleep causes emotional impairment and difficulty with mental
processing. As people become more sleep deprived, they may
experience more depression and mood swings. Tempers flare more
often, and sleep deprived people become less cooperative with
others.

Lack of sufficient sleep is believed to have contributed to many
well-known accidents, such as the explosion of the Challenger
space shuttle, the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, and the
nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. It is believed that lack of sleep
contributed to poor decision making in each of these incidents,
with disastrous results.

If you add to these examples the many hundreds of thousands of
other accidents every year caused by sleep deprivation, it
becomes clear that cutting back on our sleep may not really be
the solution for greater productivity we are looking for.

If you are studying for important exams, you will be better off
getting sufficient sleep the night before, rather than spending
the whole night desperately trying to cram more information into
your head.

Your brain uses its sleeping hours to process the information of
the day and to consolidate new memories. Cutting back on sleep
in order to study instead will interfere with this process.

How can you tell if you are getting enough sleep? The ideal
amount varies from person to person, and it is not always the
same.

Ask yourself: When you wake up, do you feel refreshed, or is
your body longing for more sleep? Do you rely on a lot of coffee
to get you through the day?

If you are tired a lot of the time, try going to bed earlier,
and sleeping longer.

You may find that getting more sleep actually boosts your
productivity and you will feel a lot better!

About the author:
This article is an excerpt from the new downloadable book by
self help author Royane Real titled "How to Be Smarter--Use Your
Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better, and Be More Creative" If
you want to boost your brain power, get it today at
http://www.royanereal.com